Instagram notches 500 million users

Instagram, the popular Facebook-owned photo-sharing app, has reached a new milestone.

Instagram now has 500 million users around the world, including 300 million who use the service every single day, the company announced on Tuesday. Surprisingly, the US-based service’s user base is overwhelmingly made up of people who live outside the country: 80 percent live abroad.

“You’ve made Instagram a place where the everyday and the epic are always within reach,” Instagram said in a blog post, pointing to notable users likeRussian cosmonaut Sergey Ryazanskiy.

Instagram was founded in 2010 and was acquired by Facebook two years later for $1 billion. Since then, Instagram has largely operated independently of Facebook, though Mark Zuckerberg has moved to make a little cash from all those eyeballs, placing ads on Instagram feeds last year.

Going forward, Instagram will likely have its eye on Snapchat, which reportedly has 150 million daily users, up from 110 million in December. Instagram is also experimenting with a (potentially alienating) news feed update that puts the photos Instagram thinks you want to see first rather than arranging them chronologically. Twitter did something similar recently, but the feature is opt-out.